As the geographical domain in which companies conduct business continues to expand, multimedia conferencing technology attempts to bring the world closer together. However, as with most user-based technologies, the user interface for establishing and controlling a multimedia conference does not provide a convenient way to spontaneously establish such a conference between endpoints. Thus, generally, a multimedia conference is scheduled in advance by a conference moderator, who must establish or receive a dial-in number, an IP address, and/or a URL for the conference, and distribute this information in advance to the various conference participants as well as the time of the conference. The participants may then dial in to the conference at the appropriate time.
A multimedia endpoint is a terminal on a network capable of providing real-time one way or two way audio and/or visual communication and/or data with other terminals or with a control unit. When more than two endpoints participate in a conference, a Multipoint Control Unit (MCU) is used to connect the conferees together. An MCU is a conference controlling device typically located in a node of the network or in a terminal which receives several logical or physical channels from access ports, and which in accordance with certain criteria processes audiovisual and data signals and distributes them to the connected channels. Examples of MCUs include the MGC-100, which is available from Polycom, Inc. Other exemplary MCUs can be software MCUs such as, but not limited to, OPENMCU described at www.openh323.org, which is incorporated by reference herein. An MCU may control audio conferences, audio/video conferences, audio and data conferences, audio/video/data conferences, etc.
There are occasions when a user (or peer or conferee or participant) may communicate with another user using conventional means such as a telephone (audio) or by instant messages (text chat) over an IP-based network. Later, these users may wish to upgrade such means of communication, for example, by adding one or more users or by adding multimedia to their communication. However, such an upgrade is complicated for the reasons set forth above, as generally many aspects of the upgraded conference would need to set up in advance. In short, the difficulty of establishing an impromptu multimedia communication prevents users from adding multimedia capabilities and or/additional users to their conference session.
Thus, it is evident that current technologies make establishing an impromptu multimedia communication difficult, which hampers the utility of such communications. Therefore, there is a need in the art for new methods and systems to allow impromptu multimedia conferences to be established simply and easily.